Tag: psychology

If the results from a recent psychological experiment are to be believed, the saying ‘’Face Your Fears’ might just have to be changed to ‘Blurt Your Fears’. Researchers at the University California, Los Angeles, have found that saying your fears before facing them actually reduces the fear itself.

Fooling Yourself into Being Less Scared

Similar to other actions that intentionally regulate emotions, such as distraction, it has been increasingly believed that giving an emotion a label, either in verbal or in written form, can help downregulate it. This downregulation is not merely at a superficial level. Brain regions that are involved in emotional processing are actually found to be less active when an emotion is labelled as opposed to when it is not.

Is Labeling One’s Fear Better than Distracting Oneself or Rationalizing Away the Fear?

Scientists decided to apply this in a real-world context, by testing how different groups of people could change their fear of spiders (arachnidophobia). Participants were divided into four groups—each of which had to face a tarantula. The first group, called the ‘’affect labeling’ group, had to state their fear before they went closer to the spider. The second group, called the ‘reappraisal’ group, had to vocalize something neutral (and definitely not negative) about the spider and their emotions towards it, something that would prime them to think less negatively about how they approached the spider (for example, “Looking at the spider is not dangerous for me”). The third group was the ‘distraction’ group in which participants had to describe furniture in their room. Participants in a fourth ‘control’ group did not vocalize anything. Participants from all groups were again exposed to the spider a week following this test.

Our Bodies Show Different Responses From Our Minds

The skin conductance response test (SCR) was used as one indicator of emotional arousal while approaching the spider, so as to reduce subjectivity. It was found the the degree of this arousal (representing fear) decreased much more in participants of the ‘labeling’ group as opposed to all other groups, i.e., participants who had stated their fear of the spider showed the greatest reduction in this fear response a week later. Interestingly, none of the participants said they felt less scared when they were asked to self-report their fear, it was just that their bodies responded less…fearfully.

The authors propose that this result is similar to those achieved by being in a state of mindfulness, which is also associated with reduced activity in the regions of the brain involved in emotional response.

Thus, speaking out your fears might just be all you need to face them more easily. You can read the published article on this experiment here.